Congratulations Snuppy! Though you don’t have a dad; though the only mom you’ve ever had is an unsuspecting canine biological machine; you are now a dad…and as I hear, Mrs. Snuppy too is in fact quite like you.

While most pups are born, Mr. Snuppy and Mrs. Snuppy were “created” through the exciting process of cloning. Forgive my use of the term Mrs. Snuppy, but as her name was of no significance despite her hard work in bringing the pups to life, I couldn’t find it in this fantastic article that I read in the newspaper. I think that it’s with great pride that the “now-disgraced cloning expert Hwang Woo-Suk” of Seoul National University (some of whose work on “cloning embryonic human stem cells” was identified as fake,) brought this wonderful news to the world!

I should be happy. Nine new “pure-bred” Afghan Hound pups have been brought into this world. They are unique, aren’t they? They are purebred in two ways – both their parents are Afghan Hounds and both are clones! Voila! They are the purest! Think about the commercial aspect of this whole deal – in future we may have a new kind of pup in the pup-sellers’ windows…and they are going to have a price tag, which would make them the most exclusive of all status symbols! I should be happy!!

But I am not. Somehow this whole thing reminds me of the movie Gattaca! I don’t know if you seen it, but it tells us what may happen to this world if we begin to engineer people which is going to be the next step…they are now moving to wolves!

In my estimation, the next cloned lot would be that of guerrillas or orangutans; and then human babies will be first “manufactured” illegally…because no government will permit experimentation on humans…and then the engineered humans shall take over (it would be easier for them, for they wouldn’t have the flaws that natural-born humans would have) – and the children born of love would become second-grade citizens of the new world.

You may call this hogwash, but a canine can see twenty times the distance a human can, and mark my words…check them out when the time comes…or probably when the time comes, we’ll have only engineered humans and pups, who’ll be able to read and write…so they shall read this and brand me a canine Nostradamus! Who knows!

As I said earlier, this whole thing doesn’t make me happy. There are better things to be done with all that money that’s being poured down this cloning drain! The Katrinas and the Tsunamis, and the Gustavs and the Kosis will always be there to give us a better cause to spend money upon! Today, we still have humans who look at the victims with sympathy, but when the cousins of these natural disasters strike the engineered-beings; sympathy would be scarce, especially for the natural-borns!

The individualism that today enthuses humans to embrace cloning would become its first casualty, as cloning by its very definition is the antithesis of individualism!

So I congratulate Snuppy, but with a heavy heart. He doesn’t know that he is a victim and that his pups are symbols of a future that I’d rather not imagine!

And personally I would be happy if even this research by Hwang Woo-Suk turns out to be a fake!